Through a Jungian Lens

It’s strange sometimes how information comes to us, information that we don’t even realise that we might need to know.  I wrote to a friend of mine about a niggling sense of disquietude only to find that my friend had been noticing the same.  We both wrote it off as synchronistic.  Then, not even hours after this communication, I received information from a third friend, astrological information.  In truth, I have to admit that I don’t follow the world of astrology with any interest.  I know that astrology has a real place, but it doesn’t “catch” with me.  That said, I don’t dismiss it as just some New Age blather as well.  I just don’t understand or relate to it very well.  The astrological information I received spoke directly to the sense of disquietude that had been nagging.  Here is a part of the information I received, information about the recent lunar eclipse:

A lunar eclipse is powerful in the psyche as well as in the inner workings of our environment.  We are often zapped with energy diffusing and need to rest and relax these few days in order to find out how we think and what is contained in our points of Aquarius and Leo in our natal charts.  The eclipse is in the sign of Aquarius and is directly opposite Leo so it is a Full Moon.  It is often a time where we feel pulled apart depending on where Leo and Aquarius fall in our chart.  It is also significant how these two signs shadow each other and become significant of future events depending upon our awareness of shadow.

Hmmm, that explains the feelings I’ve been having, feelings that include a tension such as one feels waiting for “the other shoe to drop.”  For some reason, likely resistance, I didn’t follow up on the note which included the above quote.  I rationalised to myself that this really wasn’t going to be helpful.  If anything, I wanted to push it away as I didn’t want to know just in case it meant I would have to do something about the feelings, in case I had to make some changes.  Sometimes, especially at moments like these, I wish I was a simple “dummling” who bumbled about happily unconscious of anything to do with the world of psyche and soul.

Libido as it is usually understood is about sexual energy, the instinctual drive to mate, to have male and female become one.  But, libido is more.  It is also about having the masculine aspects and the feminine aspects within one’s self, an act of coniunctionis, a holy marriage.  Libido is about psychic energy which in turn feeds the body’s energies. Libido as defined by Jung:

By libido I mean psychic energy. Psychic energy is the intensity of a psychic process, its psychological value. This does not imply an assignment of value, whether moral, aesthetic, or intellectual; the psychological value is already implicit in its determining power, which expresses itself as definite psychic effects.

Unlike Freud, libido is not limited to a sexual definition.  It is all about energy, activation, the psyche.  When one goes out into the world and gives it meaning, one is assigning value, an act of libido.  When one withdraws into an introverted stance, libido is withdrawn and value is lost.  Libido is not simply about sex drive.  It is about life force.  Gwynne Mayer writes:

We oftentimes get our energy plugged up within a relationship to the ‘other’ even though we realize the other is our self/Self.  Our energy becomes short circuited or contained, when in fact, it would help us to move through our erotic/eros nature to come to a point of release of that same energy. The whole universe, the energy of each part of the body moves both internally and externally, subjectively and objectively, contracting and expanding, inhaling and exhaling, and pulsating inward to the nucleus of the inner psyche and outward to all other selves and dimensions. The freer the energy movement becomes, in keeping with its own integrity and cohesion, the more intense becomes the life and the fuller becomes the consciousness….hence the full living within and between multidimensional comprehension, joining in the dance with others as we move toward owning all that we have thought as separate.

So, how does this translate into relationships with others?  How does this translate with relationship to one’s self and one’s inner world?  Where does love, eros, come into this picture?

Faceless … dreams are often faceless.  When I lead dream work, especially with groups, I had a person present a dream several times, each time from the point of view of other figures in the dream and of the apparently inanimate objest as well.  At that time I understood this as the Gestalt approach to dream work.  Then, I rethought exactly what I was doing from a Jungian standpoint where the dreamer is all parts of the dream.  The archetypes and images that are shifting in and out of one’s dream are communication attempts between the self and the personal and collective unconscious which has but one goal, bringing the shadow to light, becoming fully aware – individuation.

I often dream but have given up working on my dreams for the past number of years.  And now, the dreams are coming faster than ever.  One aproach to understanding what is currently happening involves Mayan prophecies surrounding the end of the Mayan calendar come the winter equinox in 2012.  Gwynne Mayer writes in “Gateways to 2012“:

We have been discussing the energetic of 2012 and how the planet is speeding up its own energies aligning itself with the galaxies and we are focusing on how this is affecting us as our lives seem to be folding in on themselves.  Our dreams are becoming more intensive, our interactions with others are intensified and it seem we are all being bombarded from the personal to the political arena…it is all part of the soup we are in, as Carl Jung use to say. We in the psychological field are definitely skewed in our frame of reference as we see person after person struggle in this area, not to mention those peers of ours in the healing professions try to gain balance and not get tipped over in this topsy turvy world.

I find this interesting stuff indeed, especially since Gwynne is counted among my friends for many years.  This speaks of energy, about an heightening of senses.  But, I want more right now.  So, I turn to C.G. Jung:

The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul, opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego consciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego-consciousness extends. For all ego-consciousness is isolated; because it separates and discriminates, it knows only particulars, and it sees only those that can be related to the ego. Its essence is limitation, even though it reach to the farthest nebulae among the stars. All consciousness separates; but in dreams we put on the likeness of that more universal, truer, more eternal man dwelling in the darkness of primordial night. There he is still the whole, and the whole is in him, indistinguishable from nature and bare of all egohood. It is from these all-uniting depths that the dream arises, be it never so childish, grotesque, and immoral. (C.G. Jung, CW 10. page 304)

There, this is what I have been trying to remember.  my dreams are my doorway, my portal to my soul, the portal to unity.